Bladderball Fails To Erupt At Yale This Year

by Choire SichaOctober 13, 2010

Considered a menace to student life, public safety and townie relationships, bladderball did not come to occur during Saturday’s Yale-Dartmouth football game, as is the tradition. Do you have no idea what I’m talking about? Then I welcome you to the world’s best Wikipedia entry: “Once each year, at 11 a.m. the Saturday before the Yale-Dartmouth game, the inflatable six foot ball was rolled through Yale’s Phelps Gate onto Old Campus, where a throng of Yale students waited. At the sound of a whistle, teams from each residential college and various extracurricular organizations would fight for possession of the ball…. in 1971 the ball rolled a six mile swath through downtown streets leaving massive traffic tangles in its wake, only to be trapped and deflated by police at Beinecke Plaza, a few blocks from its starting point….In 1976, a car and its driver were badly trampled by the mob of students chasing the ball over the top of the vehicle…. “Magically released from the Fallopian tube-like tunnel of Phelps Gateway, it bounces rhythmically above the swarming hands of the crowd like a huge ripe ovum being battered by thousands of frantic spermatozoa.”